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Amazon's Kindle e-books store has been hit hard by spam in the last few months, according to Reuters. Hundreds of entities are pulling quasi-useless content found for free or for a small price on the Internet, reformatting it into e-books, and selling it under catchy titles for very little, clogging Amazon with low-value materials that stand to mire the platform and maybe make customers think twice about future e-book purchases.

Many of the books are created with Private Label Rights (PLR) content, which is often milled by content creators on the Internet and then made available for free or a low price. PLR content can then be reformatted or even modified if the buyer wants, and then put up for sale under virtually anyone's name. PLR content is usually of the beginner-how-to or get-rich-quick variety that baits those looking for their elevator to success: make a certain number of dollars in a much smaller number of days, money-making blogging for beginners, how to start an Internet marketing business.

A private label rights (PLR) book sells for $7 on a website.

Content like this is posted around the Internet for free or at low prices—one purveyor we found, Jett Digitals, sells the PLR to a light tome called Podcasting for Beginners for $7—and once bought, the buyer is free to do whatever he or she wants with it. In this case, they can simply convert it to a Kindle e-book, submit it to the store, and begin reaping 30 to 70 percent profit from each sale.

Inside the traded content, the information is very basic and often the text is poorly written, little better than what might be found on a content-farm page, though it tends to go on for 50 or so pages. Some of the spam e-books, such as Zero to Fifty in 30 Days, encourage their readers to set up a website and offer for sale a "valuable free report" they find online.

Many "books" can be made out of free content found on the Internet and given an SEO-optimized title on the Kindle store.

Reuters cites Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University as saying that 2.8 million nontraditional books were published in 2010 alongside 302,000 conventional paper books. For comparison, 2002 saw fewer than 250,000 books published over both categories.

While some of the millions last year are worthwhile books routing around the morass that can be traditional publishing, many are recycled, even stolen content. Mike Essex, a search specialist at digital marketing firm Koozai, copied and pasted the lyrics to "This Is The Song That Never Ends" over 700 pages, ended the song prematurely, and posted it to Amazon's Kindle store, which apparently does not even do a cursory check for repetition that is done to boost page counts and make books look like they are a better value.

Anyone can resell this PLR book after they've bough it from the writer, or not—we found a version free for the taking on a document-hosting site.

Reuters also spoke to an author, Shayne Parkinson, who found one of her novels posted for sale by someone else under a different name. Other spam sellers simply co-opt the name of a well-known author to attach to their books, and if he's no longer alive to defend himself, even better: the prolific e-book author Manuel Ortiz Braschi sells a version of Pursuit by Lester Del Rey, who died in 1993, which Ortiz claims to have edited.

The content is also becoming increasingly self-referential, not unlike the Zero to Fifty book described above. There are now several titles readers can purchase that will teach them to turn found content around into 10 to 20 Kindle e-books they can sell for an income stream of their very own.

Lester Del Rey and Manuel Ortiz Braschi: one of the great intellectual duos of this century.

We expect Amazon would have a difficult time trying to prevent the spam books from entering their market at all, but some better filtering tools might help. Amazon stated to Ars that it has "processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store," as such books "don't improve the customer experience." Given The Song That Never Ends Vol. 1 and Ortiz's edition of Pursuit, these tools could perhaps be more robust.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, suggested that Amazon could establish a social networking solution that lets users see recommendations from trusted friends. This is similar to Google's +1 service attached to search results, aimed at dealing with Google's own problems with spam rising in its own search ranks.

Another proposed solution is requiring a fee from would-be authors to post their books on the Kindle store. While small costs clearly don't deter many authors who are already paying a few dollars for PLR content, a slightly larger cost of $50 to $100 might be enough to slow down opportunists like Ortiz, who has posted over 3,800 books for sale in the Kindle store.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

This stuff is really destroying the Kindle market place for me. Even the slightly less spammy books that are none the less shat out en masse are really awful. I don't object to its presence, I object to how difficult it is to filter this shit out.

Whenever something new appears, people will abuse it. As for me, I always buy straight from the Amazon site by finding the real, paper book and following links to the e-version and then have them send it to my Kindle via Whispernet.

They've been going to hobbyist websites and selling books made entirely of copy/pasted, user-submitted how-to guides for several years now. It's amazing how easy it is to take the average person's ramblings and monetize it without involving them in the least. Entire wikipedia pages of content show up in these sorts of groups' "offerings" as well.

Amazon doesn't care as long as they get a share of the profits. Remember when they were selling that guide to child molestation, and refused to take it down because of free speech? Same thing. They since pulled it, but last I saw, they're still selling a guide about how to beat kids into submission ("Train Up A Child"). Amazon has no shame whatsoever.

On the App store I've been annoyed by all the how to and cheat guides. For example, there are dozens of Angry Birds guides generally either free or for a dollar. They clutter up the store and in some cases make it hard to figure out which is the real app. Presumably they all contain the same content as the various walk through web sites.

Does Ars Technica have a pretty hard rule about being at least 8 hours late when copying the latest feed published everywhere else (I mean everywhere--Oprah magazine sent out a special print issue just for this).

I disagree on a fee - it should be a deposit, returnable against revenue. Any legitimate author is going to recoup that quite quickly, but those listing thousands of books will find it prohibitively expensive.

Alternately, yea, they could do some filtering and ban PLR from the store outright.

Still less dishonest than the big guys charging $8.99 for the Kindle edition of a book published 20 years ago.

Agreed. The whole eBook craze is a racket. You can get a dead-tree book for a quarter at your local Salvation Army thrift store. You can borrow books from a library for nothing. And any book that is popular can be downloaded free in ePub format. Not sure if a Kindle can do ePub, but a nook running Android can if you can install FBReader or something like it.

For all the restrictions artificially imposed upon eBooks, they really need to be a lot cheaper. But as long as people will pay, they'll gladly keep ripping them off. See also: Call of Duty games.

It's a shame that this is happening, and as an author who's started taking advantage of this direct, non-traditional publishing, it makes me feel a bit sick to think my books will be floating in this sea of crap. But that's the Internet for you. Just like anything, you have to dig through tons of dirt to find your gold and diamonds.

At the very least, on Amazon there's a button to click to report a self-published book as being inappropriate. Hopefully this is being used.

Also, before you buy a book for your Kindle, Nook, iBook, what-have-you, you always have the option of downloading and reading a sample -- and you should always at least glance through the reviews, and make sure there's plenty of positive feedback.

Still less dishonest than the big guys charging $8.99 for the Kindle edition of a book published 20 years ago.

Agreed. The whole eBook craze is a racket. You can get a dead-tree book for a quarter at your local Salvation Army thrift store. You can borrow books from a library for nothing. And any book that is popular can be downloaded free in ePub format. Not sure if a Kindle can do ePub, but a nook running Android can if you can install FBReader or something like it.

Yeah! And I can buy CD's at Salvation Army for less than a buck! And listen to the radio for free! That whole MP3 thing is a scam!

Oh, and I can rent a movie from Redbox for a buck! And see all the popular ones on my tv for free! Netflix is a total scam!

Quote:

For all the restrictions artificially imposed upon eBooks, they really need to be a lot cheaper. But as long as people will pay, they'll gladly keep ripping them off. See also: Call of Duty games.

Yeah, because it offers zero additional features over a physical copy, no additional portability, no additional convenience, no ability to adjust font sizes on the fly or make and share annotations without defacing the ebook! Its like, totally worse than a physical copy in every single concievable way and as such is a total scam to pay any price even close to physical price!

I'm an absolute beginner writer, what I write is short, and I can rarely do so due to injury. Sparing you my life story, one thing Kindle offers me is the ability to sell my work for 20 to 30 cents. When I am ready to begin publishing I will be able to publish my work episodically and if it doesn't sell, it won't be a major loss on my part. With Kindle I can easily publish a book chapter by chapter, and upon completing the book I can wrap it all up.

Having a $50 to $100 entry fee means I'm SOL if I want to use Kindle to publish episodically. I do 20 chapters, that's $1000 at least, then another $50 for the wrap up version, and if I decide I want to group every 5 chapters into mini-books with a discount I.E. 5 for the price of 3, I have to pay the publication fee yet again.

Instead of putting in a cost of entry, why doesn't Amazon restrict all sales to the original author or the owner of the original intellectual property and ban derivative works? Heck, make all derivative/duplicate works pay a $100 comparison fee to make sure they deviate from the original far enough to warrant a separate publication!

Amazon could require a "professional account" for $5,000?/year to add more than 1 eBook a week to the Kindle store. That would slow the bulk spam to a trickle. (And have a terms-of-service for using it.)

Or just red-flag any account submitting more than 1 a week and pass it on to humans for some manual oversight.

Yeah, because it offers zero additional features over a physical copy, no additional portability, no additional convenience, no ability to adjust font sizes on the fly or make and share annotations without defacing the ebook! Its like, totally worse than a physical copy in every single concievable way and as such is a total scam to pay any price even close to physical price!

Easy, Capt. Sarcasmo.

I own a Kindle and buy a lot of NEW titles. I love not having to tote paper around, and appreciate the other features... but at some level, retail price should reflect production costs. I'm not saying ebook versions of titles which have long since earned back their initial costs should be free, but how about $2.99 rather than $8.99? Charging more than a paperback copy of the book is fairly insulting.

Yeah, because it offers zero additional features over a physical copy, no additional portability, no additional convenience, no ability to adjust font sizes on the fly or make and share annotations without defacing the ebook! Its like, totally worse than a physical copy in every single concievable way and as such is a total scam to pay any price even close to physical price!

Easy, Capt. Sarcasmo.

I own a Kindle and buy a lot of NEW titles. I love not having to tote paper around, and appreciate the other features... but at some level, retail price should reflect production costs. I'm not saying ebook versions of titles which have long since earned back their initial costs should be free, but how about $2.99 rather than $8.99? Charging more than a paperback copy of the book is fairly insulting.

Retail price, in this and any other market, reflects what the market will bear. Cost is almost incidental, if the cost is higher than the market will bear the product simply cannot be produced profitably. Obviously the market will bear more than $2.99, thus higher prices are common.

I'm not rushing out to replace all the books I have physical copies of anytime soon, mind you, but I certainly would consider a Kindle copy just as good as a physical copy when I buy new content, in fact it has advantages over that physical copy that for me outweigh the drawbacks. As a result, the pricing seems fair enough for me, for new content. Its not low enough for me for content I already own, thus they lose out on those sales. If its not low enough for you, period, then you should not buy it. After all, you, and I, are the market, and if nobody is buying, prices come down or the product fails.

Yeah, because it offers zero additional features over a physical copy, no additional portability, no additional convenience, no ability to adjust font sizes on the fly or make and share annotations without defacing the ebook! Its like, totally worse than a physical copy in every single concievable way and as such is a total scam to pay any price even close to physical price!

Easy, Capt. Sarcasmo.

I own a Kindle and buy a lot of NEW titles. I love not having to tote paper around, and appreciate the other features... but at some level, retail price should reflect production costs. I'm not saying ebook versions of titles which have long since earned back their initial costs should be free, but how about $2.99 rather than $8.99? Charging more than a paperback copy of the book is fairly insulting.

*Insert comment made in every ebook thread about the cost of producing a dead tree book*

You're simply not paying much for the paper, like how digital games cost as much as physical disk ones (until steam discounts the heck out of them, anyway), you're paying for the author, the sellers margin, the editor, promotion costs, licensing costs for cover art, etc. Discounting is more common with paper books thanks to competition, it's simply lacking in the digital world. Amazon owns it, while in the physical world you have independent book stores, supermarkets and big chains all selling books, along with dozens of online sites. It's pretty easy to sell paper books, but getting the rights to sell digital books is pretty difficult so there's a premium there.

Yeah, because it offers zero additional features over a physical copy, no additional portability, no additional convenience, no ability to adjust font sizes on the fly or make and share annotations without defacing the ebook! Its like, totally worse than a physical copy in every single concievable way and as such is a total scam to pay any price even close to physical price!

Easy, Capt. Sarcasmo.

I own a Kindle and buy a lot of NEW titles. I love not having to tote paper around, and appreciate the other features... but at some level, retail price should reflect production costs. I'm not saying ebook versions of titles which have long since earned back their initial costs should be free, but how about $2.99 rather than $8.99? Charging more than a paperback copy of the book is fairly insulting.

*Insert comment made in every ebook thread about the cost of producing a dead tree book*

You're simply not paying much for the paper, like how digital games cost as much as physical disk ones (until steam discounts the heck out of them, anyway), you're paying for the author, the sellers margin, the editor, promotion costs, licensing costs for cover art, etc. Discounting is more common with paper books thanks to competition, it's simply lacking in the digital world. Amazon owns it, while in the physical world you have independent book stores, supermarkets and big chains all selling books, along with dozens of online sites. It's pretty easy to sell paper books, but getting the rights to sell digital books is pretty difficult so there's a premium there.

This is also a very good point. Production costs simply are nowhere near what people think they are for physical books. Also, digital production costs more than most people suspect. For software, a physical boxed copy of a game may cost a dollar in packaging and a few cents for the CD. For books its simply mass produced in such volume that the costs are miniscule.

Most of the money spent is in producing the work, not replicating it, whether its physical or digital.

[qoute]Instead of putting in a cost of entry, why doesn't Amazon restrict all sales to the original author or the owner of the original intellectual property and ban derivative works?[/qoute]

Because that's hard to determine and very labor intensive at times?

Even with a 50 buck a entry fee. You'd just have to decide what was worth publishing or not. If it's worthwhile surely at a dollar a pop you can find 100 people willing to buy it on the net. If not, you might not need to publish it.

The prices though, I'm sure, are just as a example. A real amount and other options would be explored for sure to let people with your demographic publish still.

When you think about the cost of publishing your short writings even at 100 dollars, it's still impressive the audience you can/will reach... high value for a small amount.

I'm not rushing out to replace all the books I have physical copies of anytime soon, mind you, but I certainly would consider a Kindle copy just as good as a physical copy when I buy new content, in fact it has advantages over that physical copy that for me outweigh the drawbacks. As a result, the pricing seems fair enough for me, for new content. Its not low enough for me for content I already own, thus they lose out on those sales. If its not low enough for you, period, then you should not buy it. After all, you, and I, are the market, and if nobody is buying, prices come down or the product fails.

We agree on new content.

Don't worry, I'm not buying the old stuff. It would be nice if the market aligned with my opinion, but in the mean time occasionally having to tote around a $.50 used copy of something published in 1984 isn't much of a hardship.

I'm not rushing out to replace all the books I have physical copies of anytime soon, mind you, but I certainly would consider a Kindle copy just as good as a physical copy when I buy new content, in fact it has advantages over that physical copy that for me outweigh the drawbacks. As a result, the pricing seems fair enough for me, for new content. Its not low enough for me for content I already own, thus they lose out on those sales. If its not low enough for you, period, then you should not buy it. After all, you, and I, are the market, and if nobody is buying, prices come down or the product fails.

We agree on new content.

Don't worry, I'm not buying the old stuff. It would be nice if the market aligned with my opinion, but in the mean time occasionally having to tote around a $.50 used copy of something published in 1984 isn't much of a hardship.

Half Price Books still gets a ton of my business. That said, I think as the eBook market grows, prices will start to come down. Volume will mitigate digital production costs, and the makers of books *will* want to take the used market over as its enormous. They won't be able to do that with $8.99 prices on books released in the 80's and earlier. Convenience does not outweigh that much of a price difference.

But yeah, for new content its actually a pretty damn good deal for me at least.

When you think about the cost of publishing your short writings even at 100 dollars, it's still impressive the audience you can/will reach... high value for a small amount.

Sure, But that's $100 before the 30%, and before other costs. And it's moving perilously close to vanity publishing. That's why I suggest it be structured as recoupable..

This isn't a terrible idea. What if its $100, but you get to keep 100% of your sales until you reach $100, ie: the 30% applies to sales past the first $100? Then you are taking a risk, but of course Amazon is taking a risk on you. Closer to traditional publishing model, yes, but scaled low enough most could justify the attempt.

Sure, But that's $100 before the 30%, and before other costs. And it's moving perilously close to vanity publishing.

100 bucks. selling at a buck a pop, if you're idea isn't worth a dollar to read to at least 130 people from a pool as vast as amazon's readerbase... it's probably really not worth publishing.

Most of our "great works" that are old were the result of people that had ideas THEY HAD to share and didn't care if they made nothing, they usually paid the printing costs and publishing costs out of their pockets. a cost of a 100 bucks is trivial these days compared to the costs people paid for things that saw no profit for their publishing.

To insist on a profit as a writer, on already low (proposed) barriers to entry, is to say your own work is either not desirable or not that valuable.

This isn't a terrible idea. What if its $100, but you get to keep 100% of your sales until you reach $100, ie: the 30% applies to sales past the first $100? Then you are taking a risk, but of course Amazon is taking a risk on you. Closer to traditional publishing model, yes, but scaled low enough most could justify the attempt.

Maybe...the 30% could still stand, afaik, the key is that you make it back.

I guess I need vanity publishing defined then, I can't grasp how a fee like what was mentioned is this extremely hurtful thing. Either that or some other reason against it other than "it makes publishing small basically articles/short works too expensive" (something usually reserved for magazines and periodicals that aggregate such things)

Retail price, in this and any other market, reflects what the market will bear. Cost is almost incidental, if the cost is higher than the market will bear the product simply cannot be produced profitably. Obviously the market will bear more than $2.99, thus higher prices are common.

That was my point. Amazon charges what they do because people are willing to pay for it. Yourself included, by the tone of your previous post.

Also as somebody else pointed out, the cost isn't just the cost of mass production divided by total units, but creation as well. But that isn't the whole story. For entertainment, you pay for an experience and you get what you pay for. You gave several examples as to why you pay a premium for eBooks. I pay much less for paperbacks, 1) because I can get them so ridiculously cheap as to feel foolish to pay more, and 2) because I can loan them to whomever without involving a digital device. Those factors are important to me. I could care less about annotating books. I never do that anyway.

The big advantage of the Kindle, though, also as pointed out, is that any amateur can write a book and publish it through Amazon. I've been royally screwed by Amazon too many times to consider it myself -- they're more "evil" than Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Sony, at least with regards to my experiences with all those companies -- but I see the benefit for those who can make it work. However, I have to wonder, if you self-publish via Amazon or somebody else, wouldn't that hurt your chances of being published by a national/international publisher? If I'm gonna write a book -- and, I am a writer, just an unpublished one -- I want the real thing. Even if Amazon wasn't the Devil, I'd want a "real" publisher. Any thoughts on that? Anybody here actually publish through Amazon?

This seems like it shouldn't be so difficult to manage. Pass all new ebook submissions through something like Turnitin.com - a plagiarism detector that checks against your own catalog and the open web. Automatically put anything with a 10% hit - or whatever % - into a moderation queue for further automated or manual review. That should take at least a good chunk of the spam out of circulation.

Does Ars Technica have a pretty hard rule about being at least 8 hours late when copying the latest feed published everywhere else (I mean everywhere--Oprah magazine sent out a special print issue just for this).

A T may have been recharging/regenerating chemical levels. Average including elimination, two bits, and shave.

Sure, But that's $100 before the 30%, and before other costs. And it's moving perilously close to vanity publishing.

100 bucks. selling at a buck a pop, if you're idea isn't worth a dollar to read to at least 130 people from a pool as vast as amazon's readerbase... it's probably really not worth publishing.

Most of our "great works" that are old were the result of people that had ideas THEY HAD to share and didn't care if they made nothing, they usually paid the printing costs and publishing costs out of their pockets. a cost of a 100 bucks is trivial these days compared to the costs people paid for things that saw no profit for their publishing.

To insist on a profit as a writer, on already low (proposed) barriers to entry, is to say your own work is either not desirable or not that valuable.

Pentabyte storage overflow with 'serious'(multiple cultural refers) artists/ writers/ creators... who died below mean/merdian life span for time epoch. 90% plus due to privation, disease or despair... explains lag in global development as creativity apparantly punished as done for love or madness which always appears to cause problems.